Tweaks That Don't Work

Good spikes on floorstanding speakers do work if the mass of the speaker is great enough to keep them firmly planted(unless your floors are creaky and resonant).
Throw rugs and plush furniture do work to calm a lively room.
Good (not necessarily expensive) power conditioners on things that spin work.
The cost of most tweaks far outweighs the benifit though. Even the tweaks that do work only improve the sound relative to the capabilities of the equipment. Careful placement of speakers can make a modest system sound quite impressive and enjoyable though.

Lugnut's post helped set the stage for a great thread which I will also monitor!

One problem will be that if someone discounts any tweak, no matter how ridiculous, 3 others will jump up to proclaim it the holy grail of audio. Say something bad about green pens, magic rocks, Intelligent Chips.... somebody will be get upset and offer that your ears or your system are clearly not "resolving" enough.

I don't understand the point here. If you try something and it doesn't work, does that mean snake oil? For example, shakti stones placed on my Levinson 20.6's do nothing but on the transformers of my SET they make a not-so-subtle positive improvement. Yet there are those who snicker at the very mention of these things. I have tried different power cords with no effect - does this mean I'm deaf or that the rest of you are crazy? Placing brass cones under solid state gear yields to me a positive - but under my tubed gear a negative. If I had just my tube gear, I would scoff at those who claim a benefit of these things. How many times have you read a review or took the advice of others and then set the thing up in your room and scratched your head wondering what the fuss was about?

The effectiveness of these tweaks are, from my experience, dependent on what gear you have. Arguing X works but Y doesn't - with only a limited frame of reference - is steering the conversation towards how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Again, I don't see the brass point.

What has worked to some degree or another in my system, did not always produce the same result in my two other audio buddies systems. The list includes some NOS tubes, component isolation air bladders, speaker wires, etc. My buddies Richard Grey unit did not work for either of us. Differences in ICs and power cords were heard in all systems like the Elrod EPS-3 and 3 sigs.

The idea is to try different tweaks as suggested above to get you system sounding the way you like your music. There are a ton of DIY tweaks from bike inner tubes, tennis balls, etc. Some older model cables can be tried and resold for the cost of about $10 to ship them.

It is all about play time anyway. Happy Listening.